


in a quiet room

by penhaligon



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-11-07 23:31:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20825633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penhaligon/pseuds/penhaligon
Summary: Each anniversary of Ben's death comes and goes with each circuit of the Earth around the sun, and each one manages to be uniquely awful.





	in a quiet room

_I am in the flowers that bloom,_   
_I am in a quiet room._   
_I am in the birds that sing,_   
_I am in each lovely thing._   
_Do not stand at my grave and cry,_   
_I am not there. I do not die._

\- Mary Elizabeth Frye, "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep"

* * *

Each anniversary of Ben's death comes and goes with each circuit of the Earth around the sun, and each one manages to be uniquely awful.

Ben thinks that the first one will be the worst, and each one after that will be progressively easier to slog through. And in a way, that's true. Time, he learns, doesn't exactly heal wounds -- not the gaping ones, at least -- but it does numb them considerably. Not every anniversary is as raw and inflamed as the first one. That's the one where Allison leaves, not long after Diego, and five years after Five, and only Luther and Klaus and Vanya are left.

Diego's leaving hadn't been pretty, and neither is Allison's. Afterwards, Ben doesn't want to think about all of the words exchanged, but he's got precious little else to do when Klaus is so drunk that he swears there are two Bens and seems intent on conversing with the other one.

By the time the Earth slings around its orbit once more, Vanya has left too, and Klaus follows suit, chasing highs that are easier to get outside of the Academy's restrictive walls. Luther stays, and Ben is mired in the fear that it will be forever. That his brother will always be cloistered within those walls, never able to see what the rest of them eventually saw. He asks Klaus to ask Luther to leave with them. Klaus does so, because he's often putty in Ben's hands and kinder than he pretends to be. Ben knows that his complaints about being saddled with minding the stick up Luther's ass are only out of habit.

But Luther doesn't bite, and by the time the second anniversary rolls around, Klaus is high as a kite in an alley. He can still see and hear Ben clearly, a strange fact that they've never been able to explain, but Ben misses him, then. Misses all of his siblings. It feels like he's stuck behind a one-way mirror, and even though Klaus can see through it, he's still on the other side of the glass, far away even though he's right in front of Ben.

For the third anniversary, Ben asks Klaus to treat them like birthdays instead, unique to him instead of shared by seven -- _deathdays_, Klaus giggles, one of the most unhappy sounds that Ben has ever heard. Ben asks if Klaus could please try to get himself into a state where he can stay a little more sober this time, for him, and maybe they can work on figuring out another way to manage Klaus's powers. With much hyperbolic whining, Klaus agrees. True to form, he procrastinates on sticking to the promise, and so the first few hours of the third anniversary are spent in such a miserable state of withdrawal that Ben caves and tells him to forget about it.

He doesn't ask again.

And so each anniversary passes a little more numb than the last, but each one seems hell-bent on making up the difference somehow. If it's not watching Klaus hit rock bottom in new and creative ways that move the goalposts ever further down, it's something that happens to Ben himself, even though things aren't supposed to _happen_ to ghosts.

The fourth anniversary is when it hits him all at once, later than he could have imagined. He really would have thought that it would be the first or even the second, but it's four years to the day when the full, aching, unspeakable awareness of being _dead_, of dying so horribly and violently, slams into Ben at the speed of light. He's learned that ghosts can't really cry, and can't quite feel things to the same degree that the living do, but he stops speaking, flickering like a bad connection and losing almost all awareness of who and where he is.

It scares Klaus so badly that he promises to get sober, get a job, get a husband, get kids and a dog, and get lottery tickets if Ben would just talk to him, and he's in the middle of promising those things in a frantic mantra when Ben comes to again. The promises don't mean anything, Ben knows, but he appreciates the thought, and it does a lot to make him feel less awful, less like he's become unmoored from all he knows in a way he can't come back from.

The fifth anniversary is when Ben is distantly aware of not being on Earth anymore, of his consciousness floating in the cold, terrible void where his monsters lurk. It isn't the first time he's been here, considering that it's the only other place he can go, but it seems... deeper than before. It's hard to feel, to think past the hazy numbness like foggy glass standing between him and his awareness, but he reaches with increasing panic, calling on powers that never left him and trying to project himself back to Earth. Back to Klaus.

He does so eventually, diffracting through the glass and pulling his awareness between dimensions like a marathon runner dragging himself across the finish line. He finds Klaus sobbing, already trying to sober up so that he can drag Ben back, and when Ben is safely with him once more, Klaus hugs a pillow and pretends that it's Ben and cries some more. Until it dries out, and he goes back to laughing and making light of the situation, in an effort to forget that it's five years to the day.

On the sixth planetary circuit, Klaus overdoses, and despite the sheer number of times that he's hit rock bottom and dug his way back up, it's the first time that Ben is afraid that Klaus will be joining him on this side of the glass. But against all odds, Klaus doesn't, like death is allergic to him or something.

Ben tries to remember that one, to tell it to Klaus later. But thoughts flit through his brain half-formed, and time skips and skitters like a bad video tape. There's a palpable disconnect between him and everything else, a distance growing like he's being pulled away.

He can resist the void's pull and stay on Earth even when Klaus is thoroughly unconscious and dead to the world. But it's like he needs Klaus to sharpen his focus, to take note of every color and sound around him and arrange them into shapes and words, to gather the shafts of diffracted light and pull himself together into a single wave again.

He's not so out of it, however, that he doesn't immediately snap to attention when he hears something murmured by a nurse. Ben doesn't catch the whole sentence, but the name is as clear and bright as a white hot spotlight burning through the fog.

He follows the nurse on instinct, chasing the name. He can go wherever he wills too, with or without Klaus, but the disconnect usually gets worse with distance. Now, however, things come into sharper focus. Maybe it's because Ben hangs on to the words and the name with everything he's got, refusing to let the world slip past him just because Klaus decided to take an extended nap.

Allison, Ben thinks. Allison is _here_.

* * *

Allison and Klaus laugh together, arguing about which shade is better, while Ben sits on the bed, legs folded under him and arms wrapped around his stomach, and tries to get it.

In the hour or so that they have to themselves, he'd much rather hang out with Vanya, but Vanya gets moody and secretive when she's writing a new piece. Maybe he'd even rather hang out with Luther or Diego, but they're hitting the weights right now, and Ben doesn't care for that at all. Or, at least, he doesn't care for the inevitable competition that it turns into. He carefully avoids thinking about Five and considers retreating to his room with a book. He likes to use his free hours to read -- way too much, as Klaus is fond of saying -- but he doesn't want to be alone right now.

It's like an itch that ratchets up to unbearable from time to time, one that he might scratch at until it bleeds. An irrational worry in the back of Ben's mind, that if left to his own devices, the monsters might take over when his guard slips.

He doesn't give voice to the worry, however, only tags along behind Klaus and thus finds himself observing as Klaus and Allison try out her new makeup set. He dutifully compliments every new configuration painted onto eyes and nails and lips, until finally, Klaus turns to him in complete and utter exasperation.

"God, Benny boy, you are _such_ a yes man," Klaus asks. "They can't _all_ look nice. You can't be afraid to hurt their feelings!" He shakes a container of garish nail polish in Ben's direction, as if the possibility of Ben hurting _his_ feelings is out of the question, and only the goo will take damage if Ben points out how tacky it is.

Ben suspects that it's an act. He doesn't miss the way that Klaus carefully imitates Allison and tries not to be obvious about, even when he's arguing that yes, of _course_ this hideously bright shade of orange is superior, what do you have against colors, _Allison?_

But Ben gets that, at least. Luther might think he's in charge, but if there's anyone who rules the roost, it's their fiery sister who gladly hogs the spotlight to keep it away from Ben when cameras turn on them, who is all charm and command that hardly even requires rumoring. She's the opposite of him in every way, and he wouldn't say that he envies her, exactly, but he often wonders how she does it so easily. How she flaunts the confidence that Klaus pretends to have, that escapes Ben entirely.

"Oh, leave him alone," Allison says, lofty. "He just doesn't care about this stuff, right, Ben?"

Ben opens his mouth, then hesitates. He doesn't want to tell Allison that he doesn't care about the things she's interested in, even though he doesn't. He wants to make an effort. She once listened to him ramble about Tolstoy for a good forty minutes. Granted, she'd had nowhere else to go at the time, but still.

Klaus groans, "_Ben,_" and Allison smacks his arm.

"It's okay if you don't," she tells Ben. "That's why I've got this idiot."

Ben grins at Klaus's indignant squawk. "Well," he says, and now a desire to spite Klaus has him sticking to his guns, even though he really, really doesn't care, "it's not my favorite thing, but I'd like to learn more."

He's rewarded with a brightening of Allison's face and a roll of Klaus's eyes. "Really?" Allison asks, a little bit hopeful, and that makes it worth it.

Ben has to remind himself of that more than once, when he finds himself seated in front of the vanity and subjected to all manner of paint in his precious free time. He steadfastly ignores Klaus's attempts to needle a confession of disinterest out of him and focuses instead on Allison's happy chattering. It makes it bearable, mostly, and her broad smile when she shows him her handiwork makes Ben happy in turn.

It doesn't look half bad, he muses, and he comes away from that day getting it just a little bit.

* * *

It isn't the first time that Allison has footed the bill. Diego is usually the one who's physically around if things get bad enough, but he isn't much better off finances-wise than Klaus is, even with a job. Medical bills run deep and costly without insurance, which is why Klaus staunchly avoids doctors and hospitals, and it isn't like any of them are close enough to claim each other as a dependent.

But Allison has money. A lot of it. Not as much as Dad, who'd never foot the bill anyway, but enough that she can swoop in and pay things out of pocket to whatever hospital or rehab Klaus finds himself in, if the costs far exceed Diego's paycheck. Or maybe she just rumors whoever she has to into noting down a payment where there isn't one.

Either way, Allison's got the means. But she never comes to see Klaus in person, and Klaus never asks her for help, which means that she must find out from Diego. Ben would bet money of his own, if he had any, that Diego hasn't spoken directly to Allison in years, and if Ben had to guess, he'd say that Diego leaves messages with her manager. And whenever Klaus gets back on his feet, he pretends that he isn't affected by any of it and never thanks anybody.

Ben observes it all from Klaus's end like a silent judge and wishes that his idiotic siblings would just talk to each other for once.

Maybe that's why it shocks him right back into painfully sharp clarity when Allison shows up at the hospital on the sixth anniversary of his death.

Ben doesn't bother trying to navigate the hospital like a normal person; instead, he tugs on the sense of Allison's familiarity and manifests a few floors down from Klaus's room. He moves as if through water, the air thick and sluggish, but it snaps back into clarity when he finds Allison at the welcome desk. His awareness feels so sharp that the air seems to crackle like sparking static.

It takes Ben a moment to process that Allison is showing her ID and sharply requesting Klaus's room number. That she gets the number and a visitor's pass, and then heads towards the elevator, her steps hurried and jerky, her face set.

Ben doesn't quite manage to catch up, dazed with the turn of events as he is, so he simply manifests next to her when she's on Klaus's floor. She marches down the hallway, and he trails behind her with his nonexistent breath bated.

Allison makes it all the way to Klaus's room, then stops. After a long, long moment, she nudges the door open and peers through. Klaus is still out and will be for a while yet, but silently, Ben urges Allison to go in anyway. To share the same space as her brother for the first time in a long time.

She doesn't. She stands there, frozen, then turns on her heel and marches back the way she came.

Ben stands there too, deflating like a sad little deathday balloon, the hope flooding out of him as quickly as it had bloomed. For a moment, he isn't able to move at all, standing just outside Klaus's door and staring at his unconscious brother.

Every time something like this has happened, he's waited for one of his siblings to take the plunge and talk, _really_ talk, and every time, they've refused to. He has half a mind to tell them that they should _all_ start treating the anniversary like a very special birthday and do what he wants, before he remembers that only one of them can hear him, the one who is occasionally like putty when faced with Ben but who also excels at avoiding everything he _should_ be doing.

Ben is seized with the desire to scream, maybe. To yell at all of them and demand to know why _this_ is what they chose to do after his death. The air around him feels even sharper, as if ignited by the frustration bleeding out of him, and all of a sudden, he finds himself at Allison's side, outside the hospital.

She's hurrying faster than she had before, and Ben only stops for a moment, watching her retreating back. Observing the set of her shoulders, very nearly hunched, nothing like the pride and poise he remembers from when they were teens.

He runs after her.

The only way that Ben really gets to see his siblings is when they're close enough to Klaus that projecting himself isn't a useless haze of half-heard words and missed time. But Klaus won't be waking up soon, and Ben is going to follow Allison as far as he can. Even if she won't talk to Klaus or Diego, and probably not to Vanya or Luther, either. Even if he can only make it out of the hospital by a few feet. Even if she can't see him. He just wants to see her and be near her again.

He doesn't know when he'll see her again.

She heads for the parking garage, moving so quickly and purposefully that a few people in her way scatter like startled birds, and Ben has to initiate half a jog to keep up. He pretends that it's a normal day, that he's walking alongside his sister like he used to. That they're heading somewhere without the Academy looming at their backs, free to do whatever they want, surrounded by the cacophony of city sounds and sights.

The illusion splinters like refracted light every time someone brushes through Ben, and he tries not to develop a personal vendetta against each and every one of them. Vengeful ghost isn't really his style.

Allison doesn't have Klaus's overwhelming draw, doesn't have the event horizon that pulls ghosts inexorably in. But Ben's determination makes up the difference, and today, it's surprisingly easy to navigate through the world of the living sans Klaus. Easier than he would have thought, considering the other times he's tried. The water-thick quality of the air doesn't change much for the worse, and though Ben's clarity of presence loses that spark as he pulls further away from the hospital, he follows Allison all the way to the dim, quiet parking garage, to her rental car.

The car is as far as she makes it before tears start spilling out of her eyes.

* * *

Ben isn't really aware of the loud voices of the police, or the wail of the sirens, or the din of the reporters already trying to swarm forward. They blur together, a mass of noise and presence, and he's only aware too much attention, too many other people around, far too many when it isn't over yet. When he's breathing short and shallow through his nose, clenching his teeth tight as his insides churn and roil. The gate is closed, he thinks. The gate is closed, so why does he still feel like _things_ are inside of him, are going to tear through his stomach and surge up his throat?

He's hardly aware of the hands on him, pulling him away from the unbearable noise and lights, but he tightens his breathing even more. He doesn't want to throw up on Allison, whose hands check him for injuries, whose presence he identifies by perfume that's nearly drowned out by the stench of blood and death. She's talking, too, but the words come in and out.

He hears something about breathing, and then one question gets through to him crystal-clear. One that he hates, for the way it tends to make his eyes prickle automatically, these days.

"Are you okay?" Allison asks.

Ben looks up at her, and the world solidifies somewhat, but only because everything in him lurches at the question. They're in some dim room full of boxes, he notes absently. Some kind of storage room. It's quiet, the din outside muffled by thick walls. How had they gotten all the way here? What does she mean by _okay_? There are many definitions of the word, and Ben doesn't think any of them are applicable here. He opens his mouth to answer, to ask her what kind of okay she's looking for, but all that leaves him is a sob.

He's horrified -- he shouldn't be _crying_ on the job -- but he can't seem to stop. He hiccups, and another sob leaves him, and then Allison throws her arms around him, drawing him into a hug.

Ben wants to protest. There's blood on her uniform now, and he really needs to pull himself together. He wants to tell her to stay away in case the monsters come surging back, because his stomach still twists and seethes, and at the very least, he might vomit on her. His insides haven't decided on anything yet, and he wants to tell her to get out of the danger zone while she can.

But he can't make himself do any of that. He slumps into Allison instead, his strength flagging. When he bites down hard to keep from crying, to keep himself from throwing up, it makes his whole body shake.

"Hey, it's okay," Allison says. She sounds a little panicky. She's not really good with crying, and tends to conveniently not be present if things get too emotional, but she won't let go. She rubs his back, even though there's blood there too. "I know that was scary, but... you did it! It's over."

Yeah, he did it, and that's exactly the problem. Ben doesn't know if Allison really gets it, and he wouldn't know how to explain, especially not right now. But Allison stays nonetheless. She pulls his mask off so that he doesn't soak it. She holds him and rubs his back and says soothing things that don't quite hit the mark. She glares so fiercely and immediately when Luther peeks his head in that all Ben catches a glimpse of is Luther backpedaling out of the door as fast as he can.

And after a long, long minute or so, the crying tapers off. Ben is still shaky and dizzy and sporting an ache in his skull, and everything inside him feels permanently rattled, but he has nothing left to fuel the tears. He lifts his head from Allison's shoulder and grimaces at the sight of the blood and other unsavory things now flecking her uniform. "Sorry," he mutters. It rides out on a hiccup, and he doesn't look up at her face.

Allison waves a dismissive hand. "That's what dry-cleaning is for," she says, even though she holds herself stiffly. The smell alone is enough to make Ben's stomach turn some more. "Are you... um," she says, and Ben can feel her eyes boring into him as she tentatively hands the mask back, "... did that help?"

Ben takes the mask, staring at the black fabric. "Yeah," he says. Oddly enough, it did. No part of him feels good, but he can focus a little better. The problem with thinking more clearly, though, is that his face grows hot, and he finds himself with the desire to sink into the concrete beneath them. He can't believe he just _cried_ on the _job_.

"Good," Allison says, relieved. "I know you, uh..." Ben finally looks up and finds her smiling nervously, "... I know this isn't your favorite thing, but you were really brave, Ben."

It's said earnestly, kindly. Ben doesn't want to be brave or do the things he does, but his sister is trying to make him feel better, even if she's not hitting the right target. It works, just a tiny bit. Enough that he's able to muster a smile back. It probably looks unnatural, but Allison's smile widens in return. It falters a little as she bites at her lip, thinking.

"I can go make sure the coast is clear," she says. She's good at getting reporters off his back. She's probably had enough of difficult emotions for the day, and Ben can't really blame her.

He nods. "Can you..." he has to stop and clear his throat, to pitch his voice above an inaudible rasp, "can you tell the others I wanna be alone for a few minutes?" That way, she doesn't have to feel bad about hightailing it out of there. Besides, it's true. A few minutes to gather himself in peace and quiet would make it a lot easier to walk out of that door. He probably won't have to face reporters, if Allison has anything to say or rumor about it, but sometimes facing his family is hard enough.

"Sure," Allison says, a little too cheery, but the warmth with which she squeezes his arm and smiles at him before slipping out the door is genuine.

* * *

Ben is, for all intents and purposes, an adult. He'd been alive for seventeen-ish years and had existed for several more after that, albeit in a hellish ghostly afterlife bouncing between Earth and the home of his monsters. He definitely knows more about adult things than Klaus does, considering that he's the one always trying to get Klaus to get his shit together.

But seeing his sister cry -– his immaculately put-together, movie star sister -– makes him feel like a kid again. A scared kid, coming to the soul-crushing realization that absolutely no one in the world actually has it all together, even though everyone pretends that they do.

Ben wants to flee immediately, to run away and pretend like he didn't see anything. He wants to apologize for intruding. He wants to hug Allison and tell her it's okay, even though it isn't. So he sits frozen in the passenger seat, staring as Allison drops her head against the steering wheel, as her shoulders tremble. Even seemingly alone in her rental car, she's trying to stop, trying to hold the tears back, but she's fighting a losing battle.

"Shit," Allison chokes out, lifting her head and digging blindly in her purse. She pulls out a few tissues. "God damn it."

Ben makes himself look away as she dabs at her face, but there's nothing to distract him, the sounds and sights of the city all but shut out by the garage's stone walls, and a smothering quiet in their place. He can't make himself leave, either. He can't do a thing for Allison, but he doesn't want to let his sister out of his sight yet. What would he go back to? Klaus, still unconscious? The void?

The crying is shut down quickly, as Allison once again attempts to assert mastery over it and succeeds this time. Out of the corner of his eye, Ben sees her wrap her hands around the steering wheel, as if to steady herself. She sighs, shaky and heavy, tears still lurking behind her veneer of control. "Ben..."

Ben jumps. His head whips around, and for a fleeting moment, he forgets that he's dead, that she couldn't possibly be talking to him. But Allison only stares dully at the dashboard, clenching and unclenching her fingers around the steering wheel.

"It's been shit since you died," Allison says, and Ben would have choked on his breath if he had any left.

"Uh," he says, automatic.

"No, since Five..." But Allison cuts herself off, shaking her head. She looks down at the crumpled tissues in her lap. "... It's been shit the whole time, hasn't it?"

Ben huffs. "You could say that." After he'd died, it had been a lot easier to see that. He thinks that Allison had often deliberately tried not to see it, but he can't blame her for that. Can't blame any of them for burying themselves in distractions or taking too long to gain that clarity. Allison knows well enough now, even if she can only tell her car. It's not like she can go and say it to his memorial, anyway.

He wonders if this is the first time she's ever talked to him out loud, the way that normal families go and talk at the graves of their loved ones. It sounds like it, and he doesn't think anyone did much talking to his statue before they all left.

"But it just so got much worse after... you," Allison says, unable to really finish the sentence, and Ben lets himself believe that they're having a normal conversation. A conversation about his death, to be sure, but it's all too easy to pretend when there are clearly things that Allison needs to get out, that she seems to have an easier time saying to her steering wheel and to his memory than to Klaus. "And I'm sorry, but I just... I don't know how..."

She falls silent, worrying at her lower lip in that way she does when she's thinking a mile a minute, and Ben watches her. Just stick around and talk to him, Ben wants to say. Klaus would act like he only just saw Allison yesterday, and the nature of the day probably wouldn't even come up, and it would be so easy. Just stay, Ben wants to tell her.

"I'm sorry too," he says.

On good days, Ben knows that his death wasn't his fault. On good days, he doesn't even really blame his monsters; they are too alien, too strange for a human charge of murder. It wasn't anyone's fault, except maybe Dad's. He definitely blames Dad. That's another piece of clarity that he's gained in the intervening years

But still, Ben hates this. He hates, _hates_ sitting behind the foggy glass separating living from dead, able to do precisely jack shit while his family falls apart and refuses to come back together. If only he'd stayed alive, then maybe the fallout wouldn't have been so bad, and maybe that's what he apologizes for today.

And then Allison says, "I'm pregnant," and every thought of death is driven out of Ben's head.

He blinks at Allison, trying to process the words. "... Holy shit," he breathes. Pregnant? A baby? A niece or a nephew, he thinks. He's going to be an _uncle_. Holy shit. "Seriously?"

"And I am..." Allison says, letting go of her iron grip on the steering wheel as she draws in a breath and leans back against the headrest, "terrified."

"Yeah," Ben says, "no kidding." If he had a beating heart, it would be thumping at full tilt right about now. There are a million things he wants to ask –- how far along? any names yet? how's the marriage? -– and he leans over and opens his mouth, forgetting himself for a moment.

"I wish..." Allison says, and Ben's mouth hangs open uselessly as reality slams back down, "... I wish you could meet her. We don't actually know what it's gonna be yet, but I want a girl. I haven't even told anyone yet. Just Patrick."

Ben settles back in the seat and, after a moment, smiles wistfully. He'd probably want a girl too, if he was a woman who grew up with five brothers and one sister. He thinks about having a niece, and something aches fiercely in the region of his chest, even though his heart has been still for six years. They're all going to be uncles and an aunt soon. He thinks he gets it now, why Allison showed up in person today, for this particular anniversary. Not just because Ben is dead. Not just because Klaus almost died too.

And now Ben is the first in the family to know.

"Allison," he says quietly, fruitlessly. She swims in his sight, like the world isn't quite solid anymore.

Allison throws her hands out a bit, as if waving it all aside. "And I am talking to my car about it," she mutters, and Ben fears that's the end of it. That she'll put the keys in the ignition and peel out of there, and it'll be the last that Ben sees of her for a while, because he doesn't think that he can maintain this clarity of presence for much longer.

But as Allison grabs the keys, she hesitates. Her hand slows and drops. She stares unseeingly out through the windshield.

"I miss you," she says. "It fucking sucks every year."

Ben huffs out a laugh, and there's nothing humorous about it. "Tell me about it," he says. His whole being hurts with something utterly unlike the physical and emotional pain that he remembers from when he was alive. Like something is tearing at what he is, trying to dissolve him. His focus is starting to slip, the glass fogging back up. "I miss you too," he says, before he slips entirely.

Allison sighs, but she's steady now, her breathing evened out and her face blotched but drying. She glances at her reflection in the rear-view mirror, pulls a face, and then seems to shrug it off, as if she has no care or energy left for making herself look presentable again. She really must be feeling awful.

She puts the keys in the ignition, and Ben lets go then, after one last, long look at her face. He doesn't know when he'll see her again. The world according to ghosts is a hazy, confusing place without Klaus's powers to burn through the fog, and Allison lives so far away in places unfamiliar, impossible to find in the mist.

Ben expects to sink into the void that his monsters call home, as often happens when he feels dissolved and scattered like this. He's prepared to have to claw his way back out on the anniversary of his death. Again. But he finds himself back in Klaus's hospital room instead, even though Klaus is still out.

The world solidifies into a familiar state -- a little fogged, a little distant in his awareness, but not nearly as bad as it's capable of getting.

Something is different today, on the sixth lap of the Earth around the sun. Ben has always thought that he's needed Klaus to truly manifest, to distinguish himself from the mass of wailing dead stuck on Earth with hardly a drop of rational thought left. But he'd gone farther than ever today, on his own, all to follow Allison. He hadn't lost his sense of self in the process. Hadn't lost his capacity to think, to feel things beyond the anguish of death. He'd done it while Klaus slept like the dead, and he can't explain it.

Ben settles in an empty chair to wait and listens to the steady tick of the clock, to the muffled sounds of hospital life, as he turns it all over in his head. But no astonishing insight into the nature of the dead makes itself known to him. He'd simply wanted to follow Allison more than anything at the time.

And so he had.

It doesn't make this anniversary better. Far from it, because now Ben can't stop thinking about Allison and her life, her _child_, wishing suddenly that he could meet her new husband and see what Allison does in her day-to-day. He wishes he could see more of Diego's life than exactly one brief glimpse at a dingy boiler room apartment. He wishes he knew more about Vanya's life than a performance here and there and a rumor about a book she might be publishing. He wishes Luther wasn't still at the Academy, letting Dad poison him. He wishes he knew what happened to Five.

But even if Ben could replicate today's results, he would be an observer at best, resigned to pretend conversations as he watched his stupid siblings avoid each other at all costs.

No, this deathday isn't any better than the others, but at least he'd seen Allison with his own eyes. When Klaus wakes up, Ben doesn't mention the things he heard Allison say. He mentions that she stopped by and knows that Klaus won't do anything about it, but he says nothing about her breakdown or the baby on the way. It's Allison's business to do with as she pleases, not his to share.

Besides, Ben is the first in the family to know, and at the very least, he gets to lord it over Klaus as soon as word comes around.

**Author's Note:**

> -looks at my TUA fics- Uhhh, three guesses as to my favorite characters and topics.


End file.
